Word: reformative
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Enter the Monk. Laughing satire soon gave way to bitter invective in the growing passion for reform. The unity of Christendom had been precarious for centuries before the Reformation. The marvel is, suggests Durant, that with its half-dozen-odd principal nations all out of step-in time, in psychology, in power, in learning-the Roman authority survived as long as it did. Italy was not only the home of the papacy, it was the source and cradle of European civilization itself-sophisticated, modern, even decadent, when England and Germany were still medieval, while France and Spain were somewhere midway...
Before he concludes, Author Durant pays tribute to the Catholic Church's own movement to reform itself. Says Durant in a passage typical of his style and temper: "The Counter Reformation succeeded in its principal purposes. Men continued, in Catholic as much as in Protestant countries, to lie and steal, seduce maidens and sell offices, kill and make war. But the morals of the clergy improved, and the wild freedom of Renaissance Italy was tamed to a decent conformity with the pretensions of mankind . . . All in all, it was an astonishing recovery, one of the most brilliant products...
After a month of underground parasitic life, the witchweed makes a partial reform, like a successful mobster who buys a legitimate business and joins the church. It sends a shoot above the ground, unfolds green leaves in the sunlight, and manufactures its food by photosynthesis like any respectable plant, while still getting its water and minerals from the host's roots. Soon its little red flowers bloom and its myriad dustlike seeds poison the soil around...
...issue started to bubble quietly in 1951 when the Communists imported an Italian named Pacifico Montanari to reform the republic's schools. Montanari, 36, is an ardent apostle of Celestin Freinet, a freewheeling French innovator who claims non-Freinet schools teach by the medieval notion of rigid authority, argues for a classless classroom, with the teacher as merely a "master companion" who discusses with the pupils what and how they should study. Montanari installed the Freinet method in all of San Marino's elementary schools except one: Mother Veronica's St. Clare's Convent...
...into this were-world has slouched a new sort of creature: the cave-chested, pout-lipped, black-jacketed hero of such pictures as Rock All Night ("Some have to dance . . . some have to kill!"), Reform School Girl ("Boy-hungry wildcats gone mad!"). The teen-spleen movies, following the monster epic's formula of low-budget and low brain-wattage, are packing in the same audiences...